1 October 06
Mapping All Them California Plants
A couple of years ago, two colleagues of mine at work started to pull together two data sources on the California flora into a combined database that they call CalJep. For many months now, I have been working to make the CalJep database into an online mapping application and am happy to say that it is now live on the web. This application allows you to look at a distribution map of any of almost 7900 plant species in California. Do have a poke if you’re interested—feedback on the interface is always helpful.
29 September 06
Tango Evening
There were no tickets. There were no tickets WEEKS ago. But I showed up at 7:55, and, lo and behold, there was a woman whose friend had been unable to make it.
Estampas Porteñas was riveting, sexy, rigid, flowing, stop-start-stop like all good tango should be. But what was so much more fabulous than I’d thought was the four-piece band (piano, double-bass, accordion, fiddle). They were given music-only slots where they each shone. What a treat.
What a treat. I tried to sketch in the dark. It was pretty pitiful but I’ll try and post a sketch tomorrow.
28 September 06
Paging the Ghost of George Washington
The United States is now officially a tyranny. You might not have heard—at least our local rag had no mention of the final debate—but the Senate today passed the torture and detention bill (or whatever it was officially called) 65-34. The torture bit is horrible enough, but the suspension of habeas corpus rights is the real kicker. Congress has just given the President the right to detain anyone anywhere indefinitely without any right to judicial oversight or trial by jury if they are an ‘unlawful enemy combatant’. And who gets to decide who is an unlawful enemy combatant? That’s right—the executive branch. It doesn’t matter if you’re a U.S. citizen or not. And if Bush were to declare that some group—let’s say left-wing bloggers—were in fact ‘enemy combatants’ , oops, into the gulags they go.
Glenn Greenwald sums up today’s cravenness perhaps best of all:
During the debate on his amendment, Arlen Specter said that the bill sends us back 900 years because it denies habeas corpus rights and allows the President to detain people indefinitely. He also said the bill violates core Constitutional protections. Then he voted for it.
The bill is probably quite unconstitutional, even to the eyes of today’s Supreme Court, but why will it ever see review? If you’ve been disappeared, how are you ever going to bring the case forward in the courts?
Didn’t we once fight a revolution against such tyranny? To quote Thomas Jefferson (thanks again, Glenn Greenwald): “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
There’s not a whole lot of checks and balances left in the system. Unless of course the ghost of George Washington himself were to summon the spectres of the soldiers at Valley Forge to a march on the Capitol to rout this adminstration and their despicable enabling crony congresscritters from the nation, in a scene straight out of Lord of the Rings.
27 September 06
Birthday Party
He was having his friends over—six of them—to participate in a contest on his birthday: make the best presented/sweetest/spiciest etc. dish with the ingredients available. He arranged to have a panel of independent judges present. He greeted his guests with enthusiasm and excitement.
They set about the basil and grape leaves and chiles and ice cream with abandon. His effort was a log-cabin masterpiece of dolmas and chiles…
He has, ladies and gentlemen, just turned six. And he’s my nephew. (Photos of Simon making pizza dough with me two years ago can be found here.)
26 September 06
Landscapes Of Moral Rot
Two institutions of higher learning and several lifetimes ago, a progressive colleague of mine recommended the book The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, by Andrew Bard Schmookler, saying that it was brilliant. I read it and concurred, gleaning from it the idea that the vast majority of evils result from layers upon layers of acts of power across successive civilizations, not from anything innate in our nature. Moving on to the present, I just discovered that Mr. Schmookler has a website and blog. The site is his response to the amorality and fascistic impulses of the present administration.
But his premise is that this moral crisis is the result of the failings of both liberals and conservatives. In the introduction to the site, he writes:
Many Americans feel a sense of alarm about the moral condition of American society today.
Many in the liberal half of America worry that the political right has been taken over by amoral forces that only pretend to be righteous while they indulge their lust for power and wealth. Many in the conservative half of America fear that America’s moral integrity has been eroded by an “anything goes” culture abetted by the moral permissiveness of contemporary liberalism.
Both these worries are well-founded.
His critique of liberalism is of particular interest:
First, unable to recognize the truth in the old idea that the battle between good and evil is a central part of the human drama, liberalism has been unable to recognize the nature of the forces it’s up against. It is this inability to see these forces for what they are that has rendered liberalism impotent to make an effective stand against them.
And, second, unwilling to take seriously the distinction between right desire and wrong desire, liberalism has been complicit in the emergence of a trash culture that undermines standards and ideals and that cultivates what is base and degrading. This moral decadence, in turn, has created among many Americans a kind of moral anxiety that has historically provided fascistic forces an opening to exploit in their quest for power.
In one post on his blog, he asks his readers for “vignettes of ‘moral rot’ in America”. He cites as an example the routine nastiness in the media, even in in his favorite television show that is at times prophetic and brilliant.
Violence and nastiness in the media are clear examples of moral rot, but what I am curious about is finding instances of cultural degradation in our landscapes. Does the way we create landscape have a moral component to it? And concomitantly, doesn’t inhabiting a degraded landscape lead to moral decline in other aspects of culture?
I believe this is the case. Trying to define a “landscape of moral rot” I come up with the following—a landscape where the forces of greed or lack of respect for personal or collective space predominates.
What are examples? At the small-scale level of individual action, graffiti is clearly one. At the opposite end of the scale would be the the result from the act of drilling for oil in ANWAR. (One perspective on the Republican fixation on ANWAR is that once the taboo on tearing into that last pristine landscape is broken, all other acts of environmental destruction would be simple.)
Closer to home, don’t we see an expression of moral rot in our current housing slump, one that I predict will be long-lasting and deep? It’s sheer greed upon the landscape. People buy huge houses they can’t afford which leads to developers building vast tracts of huge, ugly, and shoddily-constructed things until the system collapses of its economic contradictions.
The antidote to such landscapes is cultivating a sense of aesthetics in our built environment. Of course this means doing something that is completely academically uncool and counter-postmodern—making moral judgments about aesthetics in cultural production, claiming a role for high culture, asserting the primacy of social order, and so on.
Some landscapes just are ugly—let’s cultivate!
25 September 06
The Loser Democrats, or My New Wheelbarrow?
I can hardly bear to think about politics these days. I’m outraged in all kinds of ways about the administration, of course. But I’m so despondent about what is the only presented alternative.
I got a phone call from the Democratic party the other day. At work. I’m at work, I said. Oh, they said, well can you just send us some money to counteract all the negative publicity the Republicans are throwing our way, to the tune of millions of dollars?
For what? I said. I don’t know what the Democrats’ program is. I don’t know what they stand for. It seems to be a wimpy version of what the Repos are doing. That’s what they want you to think, said my telephone volunteer.
I felt blackmailed. I’m outraged at both of them. And, yes, the Repos are probably rubbing their hands about people like me. In a year when the war in Iraq is an obvious slam dunk for the Democrats, they’ve decided to run mid-term elections on the economy.
So I bought a new wheelbarrow, in which I plan to transport many hundreds of pounds of Republican manure from across the road onto next year’s summer garden.
24 September 06
Soul Of A Nation
This past week the Senate debated whether to redefine torture as something other than the gentle practices of waterboarding and inducing hypothermia. The fact that we’re having a political debate about torture, that such actions are just not universally condemned by everyone, right and left, is truly astonishing. Something has shifted in this country over a generation or so, a shift that goes far deeper than electoral politics, a shift of spirit and soul.
Spirit and soul. The archetypal psychologist James Hillman distinguishes between these two notions in a way I think is illuminating:
Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury—to use an image from St. Augustine—a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior…Spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negativa...The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.
– James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, 1975.
We retreat to little things. Sketching. Gardening. But these are things that create soul, as the Romantics well understood.
23 September 06
Sketchcrawl XI
Today we finally joined the source, the San Francisco sketchcrawl outing to Sausalito. This effort was started by Enrico Casarosa two years ago; it’s grown into a worldwide movement.
I was trying out the Derwent Inktense watercolor pencils today. I’ll post some scans tomorrow, but I like them the pencils very much: they are, indeed, intense.
We were joined by Erin, Emma, and Gretel. A great way to escape the Sacramento Valley smoke and north wind…
I’ll post some sketches tomorrow.
[now uploaded; too bad the bull terrier came out looking like a cross between a pig and a wolf…]
22 September 06
Greening the Parking Spot
(I’m blogging this in the dark—we’ve had no power since 9 AM, due to the wind storm.) Yesterday, a number of environmental design activists in San Francisco, and perhaps elsewhere, declared it to be PARK Day. Rather than occupying a 2 hour metered parking spot with a car, they set up a temporary park, often complete with a lawn and a tree! They did this at a dozen or more sites throughout the city.
(From WorldChanging).
21 September 06
The Best Meal of Our Lives
Or certainly a top candidate: Tim and Carolina’s wedding, at El Convento in Boadilla del Monte.
Part of this is always, inevitably, context. But I think we arrived in Spain at a time when the cuisine, previously safe, predictable, heavy on the pork to an extreme degree, has been experimenting with copious fresh produce, an interested and interesting clientele, and just plain panache.
The wedding menu featured meats, salad, seafood in novel and interesting combinations (smoked duck and asparagus in an intriguing-looking soup, for instance). But we were offered, and accepted, a “real” vegetarian menu. Watermelon gazpacho; saffron-flavored tagliatelle. Shaved cepes with an exquisite sauce. A chocolate-hazelnut mousse drizzled with tiramisu “soup.”
Was it because, at 10 pm, we were starving? Hardly. The appetizers served outside would ordinarily have fed us on an evening, not counting the meat ones. No. Food in Spain is now Interesting.
(For a fulsome and very elaborate account of a different kind of Spanish meal, see Ethan’s Barcelona Extravaganza.)